Said says Amina Hoax MacMaster-mind is Orientalist

After that, the word Orientalism permeated popular Arab-American Twitter feeds and Web sites like KabobFest.

But this time, the Web community was using the word to describe the 40-year-old Anglo-American, creating multiple Blogspot and Facebook accounts to speak for an Arab-American, lesbian figment of his imagination, and eventually represent women like her on big American media outlets like CNN.

"I think Edward Said would say Tom MacMaster is a perfect example of Orientalism itself," said Najla Said, acclaimed Arab-American performer and Palestine advocate, conjuring her late father, who originally penned the term Orientalist to describe Western media that endeavors to simplify the non-West in inaccuracies and stereotypes-- To portray the Arab, without giving her a voice, for instance.

"I didn't write about Orientalism, but was born into knowing what it was," Said told The International Business Times in an exclusive interview, "Orientalism is: I don't need you telling my story."

"MacMaster was trying to be the only one to explain what this kind of woman is going through," Said said.

Tom MacMaster wrote of Amina's political involvement in the ongoing popular movement against Syria's Assad regime on the streets of Damascus-- all the way from his graduate school in Edinburgh, Scotland.

And in his imagination, he sexualized her and put her on his blog, in a bikini at Sharm El-Sheikh in faraway Egypt with her "pretty lesbian" lover Zina, an ironic name, homonymous with the word for sexual misconduct in Islamic Shariah, or holy law.

"Indeed, I enjoyed 'puppeting' this woman in my head," MacMaster said in an "Apology to Readers" on the former Gay Girl blog site, now renamed A Hoax.

"While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground," MacMaster wrote in another apology on the site.